We associate spring pictures ("shunga") with the Edo period, lovers usually fully dressed with just an aperture or two for maneuvers, equipped as we would all like to be but seldom are, earnestly engaged with a dedication that is a far remove from the normal spheres in which we operate.
Consequently, traditional shunga come, as it were, endistanced. It is aesthetically too far away from us to feel the pull that the original customers did. We regard it uninvolved. Though intended to raise unchaste thoughts, the spring picture no longer does so. Even the government now finds no reason to censure this genre of print.
But the art of shunga was not confined to the Edo period. It continued to be made because of steady demand, and there are many examples in the Meiji, Taisho, Showa and Heisei eras. Much, however, has changed, including our apprehension of the prints themselves.
In the later spring pictures, the lovers are often nude or in Western dress, wearing hats, eyeglasses, equipped with buttons and belts. The mighty equipment of yesteryear has dwindled into something approximating normality. In other words, we no longer find the lovers fabulous beings from another age whose gymnastics fail to move any sense other than the aesthetic.
These lovers are like us. And as we watch their mundane couplings, we begin to feel something of what the original Edo viewers must have felt. Though it is true, as Sir Kenneth Clark has asserted, that a nude that fails to move us on this level is not a very good piece of work, it is also true that if the nude moves us only on this level we will then have to find a different way of evaluating it.
This is the problem posed by Taisho and Showa shunga. Though the Meiji product is now endistanced (frock coats, parasols, bathing costumes), those of later eras are not. Let us turn to a Showa plate. Here lies a gentleman in a suit just like mine divesting a lady of undergarments just like yours. Among the things we feel is identification. No longer are we protected by fireproof aestheticism. The flames of passion rise.
Or not. My point is that the nearer in time the spring picture approaches, the more we feel its warmth. At the same time (and this is more serious), the less we appreciate the aesthetic worth of the print. The author of this collection makes the point that such literalism is still art. To do so, he compares the erotic print with the explicit photo (and includes two as samples) maintaining that "as erotic art, shunga, ancient and modern, is far superior to dirty pictures shot by a camera." He then wades boldly into troubled waters by asserting that photos are "more obscene than erotic."
This division has somehow defied elucidation, though some of the best legal minds have been long occupied with it. Popular consensus would seem to indicate that if a representation is "stimulating" it is then obscene, nothing more than pornographic. If, on the other hand, the stimulation is somehow less, then it is erotic and the representation a work of art. The degree of stimulation depends on the distance of object (picture) from subject (me).
This necessary distance can be achieved in many ways -- size of reproduction, black-and-white w vs. color, and (above all) scholarly detail. Nothing dampens desire like a full exegesis. A determined academic approach, packed with paraphernalia, can achieve a remarkable endistancing.
This is something that the author, himself a scholar, knows well. His "Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex" and "The Cosmic Embrace: An Illustrated Guide to Sacred Sex" are models of the scholastic approach to material not often so approached.
Here, however, we find him in more casual mode, unbuttoned as it were, as he turns with us the pages of beloved albums, dropping an impressionistic comment here and there. Only a couple of the plates are dated or identified, few of the artists are named, dates are never precise, and even the text (usually a part of the shunga picture) is only occasionally translated ("Yes, yes! More, more!"), along with the onomatopoeia ("Pant-pant! Slap-slap! Gurgle-gurgle!")
This open-handed approach makes for riveting viewing. At the same time, though much of the draftsmanship is superior, it is difficult to draw back far enough to achieve anything like objectivity. But perhaps this was not desired in such a reader-friendly publication as this.
The volume can be acquired at the larger book stores if it is not sold out. Otherwise, it is available through The East Publications, Mamiana Arc Building, Higashi Azabu 3, 2-1, Minato-ku, Tokyo. Tel. (03) 3224-3751, fax (03) 3224-3754.
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